Rewired Learning Blog

Making PowerPoint more effective

    Thinking about what I have mentioned concerning the use of powerpoints, I have created one about making them better, and shared it on SlideShare as well. The seven tips, as you can page through below, are fairly straighforward and to the point. It does mean more work, but the result is a more attentive audience and with more attention comes more retention of the material.

Making Excellent PowerPoints

View more presentations from Chris Jocham.

Emotion and learning fit together perfectly

Yesterday I attended a meeting with other U.S. history teachers from my county. We are part of a federal grant that was initiated to increase the level of knowledge and the styles of teaching U.S. history is presented in our high schools. Our speaker is a professor at Georgia State University and his presentation focused on the constitution and citizenship. Admittedly I was interested in the topic, but I became more and more drawn in to the presentation. I looked at our speaker and I realized why, he loved his topic…or he was a good actor. His eyes widened and subsided, brows arched and furrowed and every non-monotone sentence was accompanied with a positive, engaging demeanor. He did not want to share something with you; he wanted to share something great, or at the least interesting, with you.

    I’m going to point out many times in this blog that new media is one of the ways to go in high school and college education, but the other point of this blog is the personality and biological part of learning. The brain learns better under certain circumstances and one of those is an elevated level of emotion. We remember great vacations and we remember extreme hardships because we link them with extremes of emotion. An average day does not have many extremes of emotion (which is probably good because some of them would have to be bad) so when we hit something that triggers this, we tend to remember the event.

    Recently I’ve read many ideas on how to bring social media to the high school and college classroom and there are some ideas I am trying to develop to use in a public high school setting. This will not mitigate the need to bring forth some emotion in my students. “Wow, cool!” is an emotion and challenges for that are all around. I have yet to see the “Wow, cool!” for learning the Articles of Confederation (what existed right before the U.S. Constitution). I would love to see it. If I could “Wow, cool!” at least once in every class, that means I have their full attention about five minutes before and five minutes after the WC event. A PowerPoint with just words and a speaker talking about them plaintively presents no WC moment, and your chance is gone. Many advertisers know this but not many teachers.

What makes your heart race? Coke, Pepsi or the War of 1812

    Boring is bad. Marketers have known this for years. If it wasn’t, then every TV commercial would just be a picture of a product with someone telling you about the product in the background. Unfortunately that is what most PowerPoint presentations do in the classroom.

 

    Soaring mountains, white water rafting, fast cars and the ever present sultry female, inspire some type of emotion that we can link to a product. They get us excited in some way. I can’t, easily, justify placing a bikini model in my PowerPoint for my classes to stimulate emotion, but I can use other things. Delta waves are large and slow brainwaves. In my PowerPoint, before I mentioned them I showed a picture of a Delta luggage terminal, Delta Burke and an actual geographical delta. All of which are large and slow (apologies to Mrs.Burke and Delta airlines but the purpose of emotion and laughter was achieved). Compare that to the plain description and a picture of a brain wave. This is much more exciting and apt to be remembered.

    Brian Steinberg wrote an article for the Boston Globe concerning the new research of body reactions in tandem with advertising:

“Advertisers really want to see you sweat. Or smile. Or bat an eyelash. Or anything, it seems, that might demonstrate a new commercial or program has enough of an effect on you to prompt a physical reaction”

If you smile at the presentation of a product, you might want to buy it. If you smile at the presentation of a fact or concept, you should be more able to remember it. Do you remember the day, date or place you first learned of the Civil War? Do remember the day your whole class laughed at something. We remember the exciting and not the mundane. Work is currently underway to measure emotions and physical reactions during commercials. If we can take that same research and “borrow” it for education, we might get some interesting results.